44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [81]
Irene laughed. “But surely that’s exactly what you get other people to do – you get them to talk about things.”
Dr Fairbairn spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I have talked about it in the past,” he said. “I certainly told my own analyst.”
“And did that not draw the pain?” asked Irene gently.
“For a short time,” said Dr Fairbairn. “But then the pain returned. Pain comes back, doesn’t it? We think that we have it under control, and then it comes back to us.”
“I understand what you mean,” said Irene. “Something happened to me a long time ago which is still painful. I feel an actual physical pain when I think of it, even today. It’s like a constriction of the chest.”
“We can lay these ghosts to rest if we go about it in the right way,” said Dr Fairbairn. “The important thing is to understand the thing itself. To see it for what it really is.”
“Which is just what Auden says in that wonderful poem of his,” said Irene. “You know the one? The one he wrote in memory of Freud shortly after Freud’s death in London. Able to approach the future as a friend, without a wardrobe of excuses –what a marvellous insight.”
“I know the poem,” said Dr Fairbairn.
“And so do I,” interjected Bertie.
Dr Fairbairn, whose back had been turned to Bertie, now swung round and looked at him with interest.
“Do you read Auden, Bertie?”
Irene answered for him. “Yes, he does. I started him off 170
Irene Converses with Dr Hugo Fairbairn
when he was four. He responded very well to Auden. It’s the respect for metre that makes him so accessible to young people.”
Dr Fairbairn looked doubtful, but if he had been going to contest Irene’s assertion he appeared to think better of it.
“Of course, Auden had some very strange ideas,” he mused.
“Apropos of our conversation of a few moments ago – about psychosomatic illness – Auden went quite far in his views on that. He believed that some illnesses were punishments, and that very particular parts of the body would go wrong if one did the wrong thing. So when he heard that Freud had cancer of the jaw, he said: He must have been a liar. Isn’t that bizarre?”
“Utterly,” said Irene. “But then people believe all sorts of things, don’t they? The Emperor Justinian, for example, believed that homosexuality caused earthquakes. Can you credit that?”
Dr Fairbairn then made an extremely witty remark (an Emperor Justinian joke of the sort which was very popular in Byzantium not all that long ago) and Irene laughed. “Frightfully funny,” she said.
Dr Fairbairn inclined his head modestly. “I believe that a modicum of wit helps the spirits. Humour is cathartic, don’t you find?”
“I know a good joke,” interjected Bertie.
“Later,” said Dr Fairbairn.
Irene now resumed her conversation with the analyst. “I’ve often thought of undergoing a training in analysis,” she said. “I’m very interested in Melanie Klein.”
Dr Fairbairn nodded encouragingly. “You shouldn’t rule it out,” he said. “There’s a crying need for psychoanalysts in this city. And virtually nobody knows anything about Klein.” He paused for a moment. “It’s a totally arbitrary matter – the supply of analysts. There’s Buenos Aires, for example, where there is an abundance – a positive abundance – and here in Scotland we are so few.”
Irene looked thoughtful. “It must be very hard for analysts in Argentina, with their economic crisis and everything. I gather that some analysts have seen their savings wiped out entirely.”
Irene Converses with Dr Hugo Fairbairn
171
“Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn. “It’s been tough for analysts there. Firstly the generals, Videla and that bunch. They banned the teaching of psychoanalysis, you know. For years people had to be discreet. Freud unsettles people like generals. Military types don’t like him.”
“Not surprising,” said Irene. “People in uniform don’t like to be reminded of the fact that we’re all vulnerable underneath. Uniforms are a protection for fragile egos.
“I would never, ever, send Bertie to a school that required a uniform,” said Irene firmly. “There are no uniforms at the Steiner School.”
They both